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Scienda

Top Infectious Disease journals

The leading journals in infectious disease, ranked within their own field — not across all of science. The measure is computed from open data; how it works, and its limits, are set out in our method.

Scope: Communicable Diseases (NLM Broad Subject Terms).

Infectious diseases sit at the crossroads of clinical medicine, microbiology and public health, and their journals reflect that breadth. This page ranks the journals the NLM classifies under Communicable Diseases by how often their work reaches the most-cited tier of the field. Titles devoted purely to microbiology or virology are ranked in their own disciplines, not here.

Grouped by quality band, best first, and listed alphabetically within each band — the bands are the ranking; we do not order named journals against one another.

Top 5% 4
  • Emerging microbes & infections
  • Euro surveillance : bulletin Européen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin
  • Infectious diseases of poverty
  • The Lancet. Infectious diseases
Top 10% 6
  • Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
  • Clinical microbiology and infection : the official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases
  • Emerging infectious diseases
  • Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology
  • Infectious disease clinics of North America
  • The Journal of infectious diseases
Top 25% 12
  • BMC infectious diseases
  • Current opinion in infectious diseases
  • Infection
  • Infectious diseases in obstetrics and gynecology
  • International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases
  • Journal of infection and public health
  • Journal of travel medicine
  • Pathogens
  • Pathogens and global health
  • The Journal of hospital infection
  • The Journal of infection
  • Travel medicine and infectious disease
Top 50% 15
  • American journal of infection control
  • Comparative immunology, microbiology and infectious diseases
  • European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology
  • Immunity, inflammation and disease
  • Infection and immunity
  • Infection, genetics and evolution : journal of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics in infectious diseases
  • Infectious diseases
  • Infectious diseases now
  • Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society
  • Médecine et maladies infectieuses
  • Microbial pathogenesis
  • Pathogens and disease
  • Revue scientifique et technique
  • The Brazilian journal of infectious diseases : an official publication of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases
  • The Pediatric infectious disease journal
Unranked 11
  • Communicable diseases intelligence
  • Diagnostic microbiology and infectious disease
  • Enfermedades infecciosas y microbiologia clinica
  • Enfermedades infecciosas y microbiología clínica
  • Japanese journal of infectious diseases
  • Journal of infection in developing countries
  • Kansenshōgaku zasshi. The Journal of the Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases
  • Revista chilena de infectología : órgano oficial de la Sociedad Chilena de Infectología
  • The Canadian journal of infection control : the official journal of the Community & Hospital Infection Control Association-Canada = Revue canadienne de prévention des infections
  • The Indian journal of tuberculosis
  • The Journal of communicable diseases

48 ranked journals. Computed 2026-09-04, citation window 2019–2022. Journals too new or too small to rank fairly are not listed — “unranked” is not a zero.

Questions

Where are the microbiology and virology journals?
In their own lists. The NLM classifies journals by primary discipline: a bench microbiology journal is ranked under Microbiology, a clinical infectious-disease journal under Communicable Diseases. Keeping them apart stops each page from being diluted by a neighbouring field.
Why might a surveillance bulletin rank above a traditional journal?
The measure rewards how often a journal's articles are among the most cited in the field. Rapid, widely-cited outbreak and surveillance reporting can achieve that — a genuine signal of influence, not an artefact of the method.
How up to date is it?
It is recomputed roughly once a year over a multi-year citation window, with the calculation date shown under the list. Very recent, fast-moving topics may not yet be reflected in citation counts.

Spotted an error?

If a journal looks misclassified — the wrong discipline, a missing title, a band that seems off — please tell us at [email protected]. Every report gets an answer, and a confirmed error is corrected at the latest when the ranking is next recomputed.

What this is not

  • This ranks journals, not individual articles: it says nothing about the validity of any single paper.
  • It is not medical advice and no substitute for clinical judgement or reading the work itself.
  • The ranking is factual and method-based, computed the same way for every title. Like any method that ranks journals, though, it carries bias and is not a definitive judgement on a journal's quality or relevance — neither an endorsement nor a criticism of any journal or publisher.

See also the Infectious Disease literature digest — a daily email of new infectious disease articles, filtered by these same quality bands.